liquid handling for hanging drop creation

Hanging drop vapour diffusion – where a combined drop of protein and screen is suspended over the well – is commonly used in high-throughput protein crystallisation screening because:

it exactly replicates the manual method, without introducing new experimental variables

crystals grown are not stuck to the bottom of the plate, and thus hard to remove

TTP Labtech’s mosquito has the ability to automatically ‘mirror’ drops of crystal screen on a plate seal, so when the seal is placed over the plate, the drops match the screen wells. Precision placement and accurate pipetting mean that drop volumes can be miniaturised without the risk of the different components not coinciding. In fact, placement is so accurate that multiple drops can be created in each well of a 96-well plate, allowing you to test up to 288 different conditions per plate.

mosquito Crystal has been an enabler for Otago University, making it possible to work with more proteins that are only available in small amounts. This allows new projects to be started more readily, thus opening new vistas for scientific inquiry.

one robot for many protocols

Easily swap between hanging and sitting drop creation thanks to mosquito’s simple protocols. There is no need to make physical changes to the robot setup. Disposable positive displacement micropipettes easily carry out additions down to 10 nL of even heavy metals or viscous liquids with zero cross-contamination.

what do mosquito users say?

“I use the mosquito for coarse screening and fine screening because of the minimal protein it uses and the fact that I can set-up hanging drops as well as sitting drops.”Heather Stone, Takeda, on SelectScience